Perplex City: Season 1, Cards #041 - #044
Continuing my Perplex City solutations. Spoilers!
- #041 - Whipsmart Wordsearch: The wordsearch here is not actually related to the puzzle - simply going to the Whipsmart Ice site will score you the answers of Coffee Annan, Cube Berry, David Hassletoffee, Isaac Neopolitan, Monkey Puzzle, Pear De Fermat, Piquant Pecan, Quantum Cherry, Rummy Descartes, and Vanilla. With that said, if you ROT13 the first three rows of the wordsearch, you'll find the hidden message "wordsearches are the puzzle equivalent of watching paint dry". In addition, there's a "wordsearch" easter egg on the "Pastures Green" section of the Whipsmart site (the same image that the wordsearch of the card overlays) where rubbing in the bottom right corner (underneath the "Home" sign) will reveal the word "hello".
- #042 - Pirates vs Ninjas: Two of these statements are true ("The treasure is not here" pointing to Dog's Isle, and "It's not on Dog Isle") and the other, pointing to Catan ("The treasure is buried here"), is false. Therefore, the treasure must be buried on the remaining island, Rompecabezas (which is Spanish for "puzzle" and break [romper] heads [cabezas]).
- #043 - Use Your Anterior Cingulate: From Wikipedia: "According to research by Alcino Silva and colleagues at the University of California, Los Angeles, the anterior cingulate cortex is responsible for rendering new memories permanent ... The classic Stroop task involves naming the color ink of words that are either congruent (RED written in red) or incongruent (RED written in blue). Conflict occurs because people's reading abilities interfere with their attempt to correctly name the word's ink. A variation of this task is the Counting-Stroop during which people count either neutral stimuli ('dog' presented four times) or interfering stimuli ('three' presented four times) by pressing a button." The "Stroop effect" is named after John Ridley Stroop and was first published in 1935.
- #044 - You Are Here: Remember: it's only the second level of difficulty and a sad number of people don't actually recall our planets and their specific order. The mnenomic on the side of the card, "My very excellent memory just sums up nine planets", is yet another clue to the answer, being: Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune, and Pluto.